What is the game engine doing while we're reading the briefing?

[Paper Tiger]

I ask this because I've seen the game practically freeze up at the briefing screen. The mouse is almost totally unresponsive and the only way I can get out of this without too much frustration is to hit the 'ENTER' key. Then that takes me to the set-up phase where the problem persists.

Now, I am not a programmer but I'm curious to know what is causing this huge slow down when the game is 'apparently' doing nothing. Here's some more info.

In both these missions, the AI side starts the game with a slightly reduced battalion on the map. They start out of LoS of all Blue start locations. In both cases Blue has a very small force on the map at the beginning of the mission.

There are also about 6 artillery support zones on each map, each with an artillery module.

Now, after about 4-5 minutes of the game starting,the game is playing just fine. It's just the first few minutes of the scenario where it's a problem. I can certainly understand why the game slows down so much when I'm playing it as it's calculating paths, making Los checks for each unit etc but during the briefing? What is the CPU doing?

[Pandur]

i allways thought the engine is simply loading all the vehicles and terrain. the bigger the map/forces the longer i have this briefing lag. but its not too bad for me.

[SgtMuhammed]

What does your map look like? I made some big European type maps that would do what you are talking about. I think what is happening is that the briefing is overlayed on the map, so the map is being displayed as if the game were going but you just can't see it because of the briefing overlay. If you start by a vehicle you can hear the engine noise during the briefing.

[Paper Tiger]

The two maps I noticed this on were 'Buying the farm' and 'Hasrabit' from my Hasrabit campaign. Neither of these missions have large maps and prior to v1.10, I never saw this happen once. And believe me I playtested the HELL out of those two missions. As it happens, 'Orchard Road' is more like the maps you're describing and it all runs very smoothly with v1.10.

I occassionally have FRAPS running when I'm starting up a mission and in the briefing screen I'm getting 0 or 1 fps and the mouse is SO turgid. Yet when I pause the game when frames are like that, they usually shoot up. Same if I get the briefing back up as the game is temporarily paused. Something weird is going on at start-up and I suspect it's AI artillery related. However, that's 100% PURE speculation on my part and worthless to BFC.

[SgtMuhammed]

Interesting.

I will try to look into it. If you can send me those two missions some how it would make it easier. Which mission numbers are they?

[Paper Tiger]

Ah, when a mission I'm working on gets like that, it gets changed very quickly. I had to adapt them to prevent that slow down. Once I'd done that, the old versions were off my hard drive to prevent any chance of confusion. However, they are mission numbers 6 and 11.